


Meridian

by viviandarkbloom



Category: Actor RPF
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2018-02-09 14:39:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1986735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens during the making of the 1964 film "Night of the Iguana" in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Not terribly cracktastic; at least I don't think so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It begins in the bathroom. It seems unseemly to call something that happens in a bathroom an epiphany, but what else can one call it? Deborah combs her hair, mocked by the mirror—more precisely, that face in that mirror, that face like a Jersey cow. Did she really describe herself thus, in front of some callow journalist? Yes, years ago, predictably revealing vulnerability, a subtle striptease worthy of Gypsy Rose Lee; reporters liked that. She now accepts, in all its beauty and limitation, the fate of her face. She has grown into this face, a face trampled into familiarity for thousands of people all over world, as known to them as it is to herself. Perhaps even more so. How many times has someone caught an emotion in her face that she thought was not there or was not capable of, had never witnessed before in her everyday tour at the mirror? Her face is that of many people, many characters. Today it is the face of a woman whose husband of not-so-many years cavalierly confesses an affair. It was in Rome.

Things happen in Rome, he had said.

I thought things happened in Paris, she had retorted.

Mischievous but sad, Peter could only conclude: Things happen in Europe.

They tossed barbs back and forth like knife throwers in a circus—the thought of a circus brings to mind Burt Lancaster, that beautiful former carny, that lost opportunity—until she retreated to the chill sanctuary of the bathroom. She removed her sandals, the tile a chilly shock against the soft bottoms of her feet, and climbed into the empty abyss of the tub: the perfect length for drowning, if she were so inclined. It was terribly clean, and she approved of that. Lying down in the marital tomb, she thought, the porcelain cool and inviolate. Despite everything, she would not leave him. The thought of making the same mistakes afresh—and she knew she would, because who wouldn’t?—with a different spouse, seemed unbearable.

After several minutes in the tub, she sits up. Well. That was enough of that. It is an efficient epiphany.

The phone rings once, twice, and then is brutally silenced by Peter's impeccable manners midway through its third ring. He drones thoughtfully in the hallway. Minutes later, a knock at the door, a declaration: "Huston says that not only Burton is in, but Ava Gardner as well."

She does not like hot climates, she does not like Huston. But the role was a good one, and Peter had been rather insistent. Like her, he had worked with Huston before, ghostwriting for _The African Queen,_ and had walked away from the experience with dysentery, the gestation of a novel (both ailments of the gut), and a ridiculous amount of hero worship for the man. Huston loomed larger than a disease and while she had loathed his bullying, baboonish face on sight, this was, after all, a chance to do Tennessee Williams. And she did like Ava.

Ava. She sees herself quite plainly in the mirror now, middle aged and yearning, but for one indelible moment Ava vividly ruled her mind's eye.

She pauses, making him wait. "Well, pack my bags. I'm going to Puerto Rico."

"It's Puerto Vallarta, darling, and it's in Mexico.” Bastard, she thinks. It would be too hot, Huston would be unbearable, and the clownish entourage of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor even more so. But there were roles and risks worth taking here—not just Hannah Jelkes, but that of a sexual conquistador in the land of the conquistadors (that sliver of history encompassing all she knew of Mexico)—not to mention Ava would be there, a marvelous witness to it, and that would somehow make it all not only tolerable but also, in a way she feared articulating, strangely, exquisitely perfect.


	2. Chapter 2

They met while doing _The Hucksters,_ her first American film. It was the new world, brimming with a glamour she believed she did not possess, but trading on her “Englishness” went far in convincing Hollywood otherwise. She was, much to her amazement, oddly exotic. Ava, however, possessed a different kind of exoticism. Despite the fact that they were the same age and on a similar level of experience, Ava was considered an ingénue, a kid—even though she had played a femme fatale a scant year prior in _The Killers._ Gable treated them both with the courtly, pleasant detachment worthy of his nickname. Toward the end of the filming they went out for drinks with others from the movie—Jack Conway, Keenan Wynn, Adolphe Menjou, and the writer whose name she subsequently forgot—and while awkwardly cradling a tumbler of gin and tonic in her lap Ava admitted over the loud brass of the orchestra that she was "scared shitless" of Gable. The tumbler glistened; tiny rivulets of moisture touched her hand, a bead nestled in the crook of her index finger, her lips were very close to Deborah’s ear. It was a misleading kind of intimacy, but one that held a heightened awareness that singled something other than what she should be feeling or thinking, something she did not care to name. Later Ava would be dubbed “The World’s Most Beautiful Animal”—an unfortunate exploitation, but like many broad brushes it contained a hair of truth.

Schoolgirl crush, Deborah thought. It was nothing. These feelings had happened before, were as fleet a fancy as a summer rain.


	3. Chapter 3

The flight from Los Angeles to Puerto Vallarta is short; the drive to Mismaloya an eternity. It’s late morning and tolerably hot, if one considers linen plastered to one’s body as tolerable. The jeep bounces and swerves over a thin ribbon of road that hugs the coastline with alarming ecstasy, much as evening wear would embrace Ava Gardner. This thought alone would cause a lurching of innards even without the delirious joyride down the coast. A crest of sunlight emblazons her lap in bright, searing flashes dictated by whim and direction, providing erratic illumination of Hannah Jelkes.  A copy of the play—ordered frantically from Scribner’s and arriving in the nick of time before her flight—rests in her lap, where Hannah Jelkes, unrealized, is but a scramble of words and thoughts following the erratic rhythm of the jeep. She fears Huston’s butchering of Williams’s words. Perhaps it will be a quick payday—not that money is the first priority, but she does not want to bear witness to a artistic debacle.

The driver hits a particularly large stone and, for a brief, beatific moment, they fly as Deborah’s head brushes the canvas roof of the vehicle. “Good God,” she moans.

“Sorry, miss!” The driver, devastatingly young, pretty, and Mexican, flashes an apologetic smile, perfected from years of driving similarly faint-hearted Americans and Europeans across dangerous roads in blistering heat. The sun arcs dangerously high and she wishes for rain. The windshield offers evidence of such: Years of raindrops scattered sometimes violently, sometimes gently, leaving empty crescent-like outlines, like thin chalk lines drawn around corpses, all over the dirty glass.

She and the driver are done conversing for the trip. The silence is natural, even comforting, as if the driver anticipates the chaos into which he delivers her. The silence of men, she thinks, is a wonderful thing.


	4. Chapter 4

“The incubation of my wanderlust resulted in the existence of Puerto Vallarta.”

Huston had said this to her weeks and weeks ago during the course of a long, rambling telephone call, during which time and to the tune of his soporific baritone she had buffed her nails to perfection. As usual he spoke of himself with godlike powers, as if he had brought this unsullied region to life with the power of his desires alone. He had described the place as a paradise reminiscent of the South Seas. No phones. No stores. Unpaved roads. Electricity at a premium. She imagined a beach more surreally beautiful than Hawaii. She wondered what it would be like to walk off the set, walk into a real sunset, walk down a beach alone with waves plastering the edges of her dress to her calves.  _From Here to Eternity._ Except she would not be expected to film a love scene during a cold dark night. At times she marveled that things like this had happened to her. This world of creation, of make believe, was more exciting to her than the imagined lives of the characters, and sometimes more exciting than her own life.

When she arrives, the town is not the quiet paradise expected. A carnival atmosphere prevails: the beach and the narrow streets are filled with people drinking, shouting, laughing. A soccer ball arcs through the air and narrowly misses a tray of glasses carried by a young man, the glasses filled with what looks like white wine. Lanterns sway pendulously in the humid air as an Italian film crew slinks around a hacienda. Who are they looking for—Taylor and Burton? Sue Lyon? The pretty women here in their simple white dresses and bright smiles? All these women, she thinks, all these women and they ignore the most beautiful one here, the one Deborah is looking for, haplessly scanning the crowd. Instead she collides with Ray Stark, who is shockingly shirtless and pinkish and pressing his sweaty torso against her wilting blouse. “Darling—you’ve arrived at last!”

“Yes!” she trills, hating the sound of her own voice.

“Safe trip?”

“Yes, hot and dusty, but I’m here.”

“That’s the way to go!”

She has no idea what he means by this.

“How’s Pete?”

Her teeth snap down on an imagined artery and remain clenched in a death grip; she hopes it passes for a toothy smile. “Lovely.”

“Have you read the script? Are you happy with the changes?”

She realizes that, once again, the godforsaken assumed didacticism of her character has made her some sort of de facto expert on the play. “Deliriously so.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful, Deborah. I’m relieved, I’ve got to say. You know plays are damn hard to translate to movies and John had me so goddamned worried you’d pitch a fit about that and the billing—”

“Wait—what?” It’s more a perfunctory protest than anything.  _Who are you kidding, kid? Isn’t that what they say in Hollywood?_

And then—Ava.

Swooping in from an unexpected angle and as if from a great height, like an eagle tracking a dormouse, she throws herself into Deborah’s arms. A perfect entrance, of course. If Ava receives billing over her, she had certainly earned it rightfully, effortlessly—for everything dissolves into the background. Ray gracefully retreats, pigeonholing some befuddled-looking local, and the crowd seems not quite as loud, the light and the mood and the songs not as piquant.

“Jesus!” Ava pulls away from the hug. Wild dark hair flays the back of her hand as she brushes it away from her face. “There are paparazzi everywhere!”

“Paparazzi? Did you pick up that term in Italy?”

“It’s very common now.” Ava grins. “You’re out of the loop, kid.”

She has forgotten that to Ava, everyone was  _ _kid__  or  _ _baby__  or  _ _honey.__  Not that she minded. Everyone no doubt would assume it was some sort of attempt at staying in character. Burton, in particular, likes these theatrical ruses, such acting-school touches.  At the thought of Burton, Deborah glances about surreptitiously. “Where are the, ah, couple of the moment?”

“Oh, King Richard and his queen? Follow all the cameras and empty bottles.”

For the first time in what seems a small eternity, Deborah laughs. “So. If  _ _t_ hey _are king and queen, I must be the jester. And what does that make you?”

The teasing question spools out a thoughtful pause, which provides ample room for a mutual appraisal, complicated as it always is between women who are friends, supposed competitors, and colleagues. Ava wears no makeup, and while her hair does not seem as dark as it once did, Deborah cannot discern if an influx of natural gray or dye from a bottle made the difference. The faint lines around her eyes seem an ingenious adornment. Time’s cosmetic kit, typically capricious and cruel, serves her well thus far. And her clear eyes retain the same queenly flash—sensual, teasing, authoritative—that had been present some fifteen years prior.  _My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears._  What the world has written upon her face, what men have ascribed on her body, lines endlessly corrected and corroded within and without.  She is still the most beautiful woman that Deborah has ever seen, Liz Taylor be damned.

“Honey,” Ava finally says, “I am the goddamned fucking barefoot contessa.”

“Of course. How silly of me—but you’re not really—” Deborah looks down. “Oh good Lord, you  _ _are__  barefoot!” A quick, strange ache presses upon her—the passing thought of her children, romping barefoot on immaculate California lawns and pristine white sands bordering the Pacific. How odd to be maternal at a time like this, she thinks. A time like—what? Of course, it is concern. Simple affection and concern, intrusive upon these thoughts of infidelity and now carelessly tangled together.

“Yeah, how about that?” Ava’s voice is a slick, sweet drawl. Where was she from again? Somewhere in the South. “When in Rome, baby.”

“Nonsense.” Deborah frowns at the bare feet. “Did you forget to pack?”

Ava laughs. “Christ. You haven’t changed at all. Thank  _God!_ ” 


	5. Chapter 5

Huston has commandeered an ocean-side cantina. In low light it burnishes sweet gold, dusty and warm, against a blaze of banners and bright walls tamed into richer submission to a darker palate. More wine. More hugging. Huston’s hug lingers too long and leaves her cloaked in a miasma of sweat and smoke. Even Elizabeth Taylor’s greeting—the tepid, disembodied hug of the queen welcoming an unwanted stepchild to the family—is not enough to wash it away. But Ava is proprietary, her hand snug in Deborah’s back as she steers her friend toward the bar.

“Stay away from the sangria,”  Ava advises in a theatrical attempt at undertone. “The fruit’s rotten—I think. Hell, I don’t know what the fruit is, but it’s not normal. It hit me hard last night. I was on my knees in front of the john just begging for it to stop—” And stop she does at Deborah’s horrified and amused expression. “Jesus Christ, listen to me. This is hardly a suitable topic for conversation, as they would say.”

“Who would say, darling?”

“Them. You know. Them. Everybody.” Ava dismisses the world with a flip of her hand. Puerto Vallarta is wild, but a tourist town all the same. The same wrinkled linen suits, overpriced sunglasses, garish dresses that one would encounter in Rome or Paris one would find here as well: the glittering reverse chameleon, striving desperately to fit in but standing out all the more because of it.

“Speak whatever you wish,” Deborah says. “I’m only all too glad to see you.”

Ava the hard skeptic emerges. “I could talk gibberish and you’d be happy.”

“Yes.”

“You’re easy.”

You have no idea, she thinks.

Ava’s eyes carefully scan the place. “Are you ready for all this?”

“How hard can it be?” She permits herself flippancy, considers it an offering to Ava’s bravado, but winces when she sees that it strikes a bit too close to the bone. Lurking underneath it all, she knows, is Ava’s sense of inadequacy, fissuring through her with the ribboned inevitability of a highway meandering into a vanishing point.

“It’s different,” Ava says.  “This isn’t a Hollywood thing. This is a million miles away—not just the location, but the script, the words—it’s a whole other world.” Her mouth wimples in discontent, as if she wishes or plans to say more, but doesn’t, and Deborah finds herself on mental tippy toes, thinkinggo on. The camera’s precision has somehow failed Ava. It has etched those perfect lines and inked in the details, but no more—it is an unfinished portrait that at first leaves you wanting more until the sheer frustration of it corrodes every single perception.  

Two drinks materialize on the scarred bar and the bartender walks away before she can question this miniature bounty of two cloudy shotglasses infused with some faintly glowing liquor. It’s not sangria; at least she thinks it’s not sangria. Deborah is afraid to ask what it is. Whatever you do, don’t drink tequila—this had been Peter’s parting bit of advice before she left.  If tequila were a man, it would be Bob Mitchum.  In other words, irresistible and inclined toward persuading one to do a million and one rash things. At the very least her husband suspected that her vengeance, the retaliation for infidelity, would be easier to come by with the easy aid of alcohol. She only wants to do one rash thing, one beautiful thing that would be worth all the risk of coming here. Mitchum would be an ideal candidate for that, true—but alas, he is not here.

As Deborah berates herself for planning seduction in so ploddingly Scottish a fashion, in such boringly calculated risks, Ava downs the mystery shot without a second thought. “I know this is a cake walk for you.”

“Oh no! The furthest thing, actually.”

“I never thought I would get this, would get the chance—to do something real. You know?”

“It’s a long time coming for you. The right role. It’s hard to find.”

“You don’t mean that.” Ava’s mouth tightens. “I haven’t earned it.”

Ava grabs the second shot and knocks it back, her throat undulating with the same smooth precision as the pale liquid that rolls into her.

Deborah stares at the empty glimmer of the glasses. “But I thought—”

“You gotta order your own, honey.”

“This place is more lawless and uncivilized than I ever imagined.”

Ava hoots with confirming laughter.

“Ladies.”

It’s Burton. No one she knows exudes quite the haggard magnetism that he does; he’s like a bright-eyed, mad monk who has finally escaped the confines of the monastery he loved and loathed. He wears a rumpled white shirt that, over the course of the next few weeks, will become as familiar to her as her own clothes, a casual second skin both soft and surprisingly protective. It will become, to her, the talisman of his character, Lawrence Shannon.

“Hey,” Ava drawls. “Got your codpiece on?”

“Miss Gardner, your felicitations are not unwelcome, but it’s your companion I come for.”

“Does your wife approve?”

“As a matter of point, she insists. But first—” Burton lays a rough hand on the bar, running his fingers along the wood grain, the grooves and dints, as if he could read it, memorize it, and pry it all apart with one bare hand. He nods at the bartender.

Deborah shakes her head. “Since I’ve been here I’ve not heard uttered a single request for liquor.”

Burton toasts her. “The owner of this fine establishment reads minds, Miss Kerr.” He drains the shot, seizes Deborah’s willing hand, and looks at Ava. “May I?”

Ava shrugs. “I ain’t her pimp.”

Burton waltzes her away. Indeed they in the middle of the cantina, waltzing, swaying incongruously to the music—mariachi-like but with a stately 4/4 rhythm—and it’s all so surreal and artificial that she thinks that the filming has begun without her even becoming aware of it.

“I am delighted,” Burton says, “to work with you, to be here.”

She is dizzy. “Yes. As am I.”

“In the fall I shall be playing Hamlet, in New York. Gielgud is directing, and he tells me—” Here Burton dips her. “—you are first on his list for Gertrude.”

Within five minutes of reacquaintance he brings her the most exquisite of gifts. And now she is even dizzier. “Good Lord.”

“Well?” he demands gently. “What say you?”

There is an instantaneous yes upon her lips, but the thought of her children pleasantly stifles it. “I need to think.”

“Thinking is the most dangerous thing for our kind, Miss Kerr.” He looks over at Ava, who is watching them with the amused hostility of a bored predator. “Now our colleague Miss Gardner is a different beast. Instinctual and in a crucial way all the better for it. She is a better actor than either of us—she is simply, sadly unaware of this fact.”

Deborah cannot quite believe what she hears: that the man lauded as one of the greatest actors of his generation, married to the presumably most beautiful woman in the world, envies the troubled star who has traded so long on her looks and who never garnered the best foothold on her career. Before she can think to ask why, Ava saunters across the room and commands a table for herself near the broad doorway, planting a drink on the table like Amundsen driving a flag into the South Pole. Domination as invitation.

The three of them sit together and initially no dares to join them; as the door periodically opens the sounds of the street wash over them, drowning out their voices—a conversational palate cleanser. One moment Ava is ranting about Mankiewicz and  _The Barefoot Contessa,_  the film that was going to “change everything” for her, and then the door opens and the ambience of the street rushes over them, the thread is lost, and the next thing Deborah knows Ava is talking about banging Robert Taylor—Stanwyck’s husband at the time.  _That_ was awkward. Burton concurs with a sympathetic yet manly purr and Deborah twitches. Another magical roar from the street again fast-forwards them through talking without knowing. It is as if watching a film you knew and loved and had seen a hundred times before, falling asleep for a few moments or even longer, and then waking up happily disoriented to that particular comfort of a stranger on a screen who is both perfectly distant and achingly, intimately familiar.

This film, however— _Night of the Bitching Movie Star_ —is on a backward loop, for once again Ava complains about  _The Barefoot Contessa._  A wasted opportunity. Working with Bogart was golden—but that script, she laments. That goddamn script. It was a terrible goddamn mistake, the way it played out with Maria and that goddamn count.

“I mean,” Ava says, “what kind of asshole tells a woman on her wedding night, ‘sorry, we cant screw, my dick got blown off in the war’?”

Burton frowns. “I don’t recall that as precise dialogue.”

With the inevitability of a wave bringing its own dystopian roar, Huston crashes the conversation. As he did with Deborah on the phone so many weeks ago, he rambles about the South Sea, about New Guinea. He repeats himself. This is a performance for a different crowd, one where the audience is star studded. He talks of the women who both love and hate him—like you, my dear, directed toward Deborah—and she would much rather be alone in Ava’s company, or at least be the object of the beam of her glance. Yes, there it is—a wink from across the table and that’s all she needs to get through Huston’s monologue. He proclaims himself an artist.

Her face betrays her.

“Are you an artist?” Huston demands of her.

She pauses. “I suppose in the theater of my own mind, I call myself an artist.”

“Brava.” Burton says it softly.

Later, when the men have retreated and Deborah is slung low in a wicker chair facing the beach, she watches the waves in the darkness. The silvery foam stitched along the edges, granting it fulsome body, the melodies of its susurrations lull her after an evening of so much talk and drink and bright lights. She wonders if Hannah Jelkes would draw waves. Something to think about. Something to think about when sober.

Awkwardly, and precariously, Ava straddles the arm of an empty chair. “Hey.”

“Hmmm?”

“You got twitchy earlier—when I was talking about my thing with Bob.”

“Mitchum?”

“What? No—shit, when did I mention him tonight?”

“Oh. You mean Taylor. Darling, I knew all that.”

“How the hell?”

“ _Everybody_ knew, Ava!”

For a long moment Ava too seems hypnotized by the ocean. The whorls of her hair writhe in the breeze, synchronized to the blind chaos of the black waves. Then she yawns so fiercely that her body shudders and her lips remained parted, as if hesitating to speak, to intrude upon the water’s madrigal that insists to them both that you can’t fight nature; you can’t fight what will be. Ava bows her head to the ocean, her profile retreats monastically into the black of her hair. In this theatre of natural darkness, Deborah watches her with a fascination that has not only continued unabated from the moment they met so many years ago, but seems preternaturally heightened in this raw, new world that they will all too briefly share.  If only this moment were a movie, she thinks, Ava would win every award in the world.

Ava throws back her head and laughs into the night. “Well, shit!”


	6. Chapter 6

With the aid of cheap Mexican beer—before they leave the beach Ava wanders back to the bar and the bartender gives her “one for the road,” a beer over ice cubes in a quaint tin cup, like one uses for camping—Ava susses out the reason for her twitchiness. They say goodnight to their colleagues and Ava, a noisy supplicant rattling ice cubes and flapping along in dirty sandals, trails Deborah back to her house. Once the door closes behind them and Ava says “So—” Deborah confesses tersely and tearlessly, Ava blinks in shock, and then Deborah stalks into the bathroom to lie in the empty tub.

Ava follows. With hair falling against her cheek, she squints down at Deborah quite skeptically and, bracing herself for the necessity of the inevitable but foolish question, takes a swig of beer. “What the hell are you doing?”

“It’s therapeutic. I find bathrooms very calming. If only I could find a psychoanalyst to listen to me in a bathroom—”

“I’m sure if you’re willing to shell out enough money, you’d find one. Or at least someone with some weird goddamn fetish.” Ava sat along the edge of the tub. “So he slept with someone else.”

“In Rome!” Deborah wails.

“Picking a romantic place to do it in no less—that’s even more insulting.”

“And he thinks nothing of it. He feels guilty, I know. But he thinks if I did the same thing that would make all things equal in heaven and earth and restore the balance of our lives. So he gave me leave to cheat on him.”

“‘Gave you leave.’” Ava snorts.  “Hey. Do you need some dope?”

Deborah sighs. “You know that’s not my thing.”

“All right, all right. So look—he screwed someone else. Well, I got to admit, I never thought he would do something like that. I mean, he's Swiss. I thought he’d be reliable, like a good watch.”

Their laughter echoes through the tiled bathroom.

Ava wipes away tears of laughter. “Ah. The thing is—”

“What is the thing, my dear?”

“Love is not—” Here Ava rattles the ice cubes in her now-beerless tin cup, a lioness clanging against its cage in a teasing threat: _come at me._ “—an eternal thing.”

She would know, Deborah thinks, but says nothing. Sinatra is a touchy subject for her. Say his name when she’s down and drunk and she will turn surly. When she’s happy, she laughs off the skinny bastard.

“Did you notice the champagne out there?”

“What?”

“There’s a bottle of champagne sitting in your sink, Miss Kerr. Wanna open it?”

“Oh God—no, darling. I think I’m done for the night.”

Ava sighs, runs a hand over her face. “You’re right. It’s late, we should both get some sleep—but Christ, it’s so _hot._ ” She does not move. “Are you going to be OK?”

“Of course. I’m not melodramatic.”

“Yeah, I know, but I have an overactive imagination. Will you at least get out of that goddamned tub before I leave?”

Deborah acquiesces. She walks Ava to the doorway. They hug tiredly, their arms heavy and their fingers aching and loose, sliding against one another but unable to gain purchase. Illuminated in nothing but the square of light from the doorway, she watches Ava sway into the distance. She sighs, closes the door.

In the bare kitchen sink is a bottle of champagne in a slick torpor of melting ice. An envelope is perched against a colorful but rusted Café Bustelo coffee can. Anticipating its sender, she carelessly rips open the envelope. Huston’s looping, slanted script says: _Welcome to Puerto Vallarta, Hannah._ She is not a person anymore, she is not herself, and for the moment that would do. Clarity would not be forthcoming. She pulls the bottle out of the dripping ice bucket—a champagne Excalibur—and presses it against her cheek. Dunking her face into the wide maw of the bucket, she welcomes the cold sharp shock and laughs into the breach.

 


	7. Chapter 7

In the black morning the cock crows, rending through her sleep so thoroughly that she wonders if it were an auditory hallucination, a soundtrack of a cruel dream. Then it happens again and she’s left pop-eyed and staring frantically into the unfamiliar dark. 

As the sky elides the dark, Deborah is carted like precious freight across the bay to Mismaloya—gently deposited into a tiny rowboat by some wonderfully brawny, shirtless crew member as if she were an invalid and enjoying the momentary frisson of skin and sweat this contact brings, pretending it is retribution enough against Peter until the effervescence of it all dissipates like the mist generated by the bobbing boat, which scales helplessly against the sculpted waves like a mountaineer trying to gain a foothold in a wall of ice.

Every day is fish and rice and beer—the diet of her tropical paradise.

She had imagined that being at such a delicious remove from civilization would bevel her existence to a sharp, pristine essence where there was nothing but the work at hand. Indeed, there was nothing to do but work. And drink. But paradise’s petty distractions proved irritating—the bugs, the heat, the tourists, the photographers, the nonstop music—and she finds it difficult to focus. Lines from the script blurred in front of her. At times the set seems static and lifeless. Except for Huston, who always finds someone to shout at, and Ava, who paces like a tiger and makes pronouncements of boredom. Burton smokes. The iguana grows fat.

She misses her civilization. She misses, of all things, vegetables.

On the pretext of bringing her vegetables, Peter arrives with tins and cabbage and the decidedly non-vegetal Tennessee Williams. The playwright seems less concerned with the “precious chrysalis of my work here” as he puts it than using up all the tomato juice in Puerto Vallarta to make Bloody Marys.

As Tennessee drinks and whiles away hours at the beach, she attempts a true reconciliation with her husband. But Peter’s solicitousness only stokes her anger. They argue, she throws a head of lettuce at him and then swiftly regrets the loss of precious produce (later Tennessee will make a joke about “Hedda Lettuce,” the precise context forgotten amid tears and Bloody Marys), they attempt to make love, they fail, but somehow amid foreplay and fumblings they reach a détente more significant and solid than the one established by her abrupt departure a fortnight ago: “I’ll forgive,” she says to him on the day of his departure, “but for God’s sake, give me time.”

“You rarely speak of the future with such certitude.” He brushed her cheek. “And that shall do.”

But when he leaves, her emotions revert to tidal proportions, rising in epic grandeur, gaudy and insensate as she rages about.

“Honey, you know what men are like,” Tennessee says.

She looks at him.

“He told me.”

She seethes.

“You’re right. You need time.” Vigorously he stirs up tomato juice and vodka. “Ava will back you on that.”

“If he were married to Ava, he’d be dead by now.”

“Probably.” Cheerfully, Tennessee pours her another.

“I don’t know if I can go through my lines with another one of those.”

“We’ll try, my little lamb. Get that script. I’ll be Maxine!”

Not surprisingly, Tennessee is a marvelous Maxine—“God speaking through his creation, quite literally and hopefully not tediously,” he declares. The haze of alcohol burns off as she recites the lines that strip away her self and build the character.

As Tennessee takes his siesta, she dawdles. What would Hannah do now? Paint the sunset, perhaps. An artist had been hired to produce Hannah’s paintings and drawings and yesterday morning Deborah had spent watching the woman work, observing the movement of her hands as she painted, the rhythms of brushstrokes, the absentminded flicking of paint from her fingertips, the stern formation of her brow. So steeped in concentration, she barely took notice of Deborah.

Standing on the balcony now she practices the motions of her hands with an invisible brush. It might do to have an actual instrument and paper, she chastises herself.

Half asleep, Tennesse stirs from the couch. “Honey,” he drawls. Since his arrival in Puerto Vallarta Ava’s long-suppressed Southern accent has flourished “like a fucking weed,” as Ava herself put it. Deborah, on the contrary, loves the slow sweetness of their voices flowing together, like lazy streams twining together and moving toward the river, the current of talk composed half in obscenity and half in remembrance of where they came from.

“Yes, Tom?” Last year his lover of so many years had died unexpectedly.  _My man,_ as Tennessee described him—startlingly possessive, Deborah thinks, as some old blues singer. He seems wraithlike, starved on a diet of grief, haunted by the ghosts of his lover and his sister; his sister was, of course, still alive, but so broken she did not really live in any way. But why, she thinks, why be surprised that passion breeds possession?

“What time is it?” he asks.

“Too early for dinner.”

“Oh, good.”

“Sleep a little more.”

“All right,” he says slowly and she smiles, hearing in his voice the fraudulent compliance of a child. “But I wanted to tell you—I wanted to emphasize something, because it’s very important—”

“Yes, dear?”

“—I’m not implying that you would miss this, or skim over it in your performance, unlike some people—”

She’s not certain whom he’s implicating in this sloppiness, and so forges on. “Of course.”

“But here is my point: What you must remember about Hannah is—” He sighs and settles back on the couch.

Interest piqued, she walks in from the balcony and the sun spreads against her back—how it had hammered hotly all day, no shelter seemed adequate enough—and now it unfurls and surrenders, like a fist opening up, in great, expansive warmth.

“—she is never ashamed.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, finally fucking finished! Thanks to a tumblr prompt.

****8.** **

It is damned irritating, Deborah thinks, to be in one of the most beautiful, sunny places in the world—and to continually dream of Scottish winter.

On their off day she is sleepily roused from a siesta by relentless banging on the door of her bungalow and as a rapidly dissolving dream of accompanying her father on a hunt—vivid bright texture of snow, crunching boots, breaths suspended in cold puffs, flashes of blood—spills helplessly out of her memory while retaining such fleeting vividness and startling depth that she can taste the chill of it all even as she drags herself, bare feet slapping against lukewarm tiles, through a moat of humidity to the front door.

Unsurprisingly it is Ava who has come knocking, and with an adoring phalanx of attentive young men poised behind her and ready to serve their leader’s hedonistic causes. “Baby,” she says, “you look rough.”

“Good morning to you too.”

“Good afternoon,” Ava corrects pointedly.

“I was dreaming of the cold.”

“Is this a cue for me to get you something cool to drink?”

“Oh God, no,” she groans. Why she thought she could ever outdrink Richard Burton was pure patriotic foolhardiness on her part; Scotland conceded quickly to Wales last night.

Ava grins. “All right, no booze. Wanna go waterskiing?”

Ava’s off days usually consist of waterskiing with these beautiful men—extras, crewmembers, locals, any shirtless, charming, handsome man will do. From the beach Deborah always sees them in the distance, the boat slicing the water, the waves neatly spiraling in their wake. She feels like the stodgy stepsister in a melodrama, the unloved heiress—who could think Olivia de Havilland really plain? she wonders, apropos of nothing—and she experiences what she believes her character, Hannah Jelkes, would feel: No, not for me, this frivolity. Her resistance helps her settle more into the character.

She maintains this stubborn self-abnegation even though she is routinely invited—nay, begged—by Ava to come along on these excursions. Hence Ava’s appearance now. The invitation itself is, of course, a masterwork of seduction: Ava, clad in swimsuit and sunglasses, contorted in a half-bow like a supplicant and moaning, “Please, baby.”

This day, of course, is no different. Except that Ava has a new bathing suit, a beautiful deep blue with little white anchors on it, and she puts a bit more oomph into the begging and the writhing, so much so that her breasts seem ready to leap out of the constraint of the bathing suit as an irresistible enticement: “Pleeeease, baby.”

“Ava, I’m exhausted.” __Ava, your swimsuit is ill-fitting in all the right ways. But you probably know that.__

“Come on. Don’t let me go alone with all these assholes.”

“You do realize they understand English? Especially the curse words.”

Ava turns and looks back at the five young Mexican men. They grin and chuckle knowingly at her. “Aw, shit.”

“Come back later. After dinner. We’ll have a nightcap.”

“Fine. I’ll have to ask Burton to come along. He’ll be my chaperone.”

“Don’t let him fall into the drink again,” Deborah calls as Ava turns to go.

“Honey, he’s been in the drink every goddamn day he’s been here!”

“You know what I mean!”

As Ava walks away she waves back half-heartedly and Deborah can pretend as if none of it really matters. A sheet of consciousness, however thin, lay protectively over naked desire and only alone and half-asleep, half-drunk, half-aroused, can she pull back the sheet for a revelatory glance. Probably why she’s having dreams about home and childhood; the safety, the sanctity of the past counters these feelings. It does not change her. Nothing has changed. She will not tell anyone; as long as she does not act on these feelings, what is there to tell? There is an element of shame, certainly, the thrill of a secret to carry—but one borne of pleasure and not pain. Shame is a collusion of the mind and exterior forces, the result of immense pressure bearing down upon one, glitteringly transformative as a diamond. It is why, she thinks, some people revel in it. But how wonderful it is to whittle away at this tiny bit of shame by using it in her work. How wonderful, so wonderful if indeed that is her motivation after all. There was additional, newly minted shame attached to that—to see love and desire merely as prime tinder in sacrifice to the great god of art. Constantly reproving the convoluted theorem of desire that contorts and bleeds from the unreality of film into one’s life.

She doesn’t see Ava for the rest of the day. Has dinner with Tom and Huston and Ray Stark. Drinks too much of a cool, delicious white wine, something Ray has brought back from civilization, and which leaves her swimming through a headache as she returns to the bungalow for the night.

Again she dreams of snow—a thin, crackling layer of white so brittle she’s afraid to take a step, terrified the earth will crack open and swallow her whole and so she stands helpless and shivering until her bones rattle. It’s the rattling of bones that wakes her. No, it is a fleeting blast of cold damp against her bare shoulder.

Awake, she gasps, sucks in a startled breath, and sits up. She had fallen asleep on the ratty couch in the main room, having draped a red linen sweater over a lamp to create a soothing penumbra of light that she hoped would prove conducive to warmer dreams.

If she is still dreaming, then Ava has slipped into her dream—for Ava sits on the edge of the couch, triumphantly holding a well-chilled bottle of Veuve Cliquot stippled with condensation.

“Damn, I’m always waking you up,” Ava says apologetically, except that there’s not an ounce of regret in her voice. She wears a white blouse and a loose skirt. She’s barefoot, with no makeup. She requires none; the shadows of a summer night are among nature’s finest cinematographers.

It seems pointless to ask why she is here, so Deborah nods at the bottle: “Where on earth did you get that?”

From outside, a distant ruckus draws near: shouting, male and female voices, a flashlight beam wildly whisking over the sky and perhaps causing a small plane to crash land somewhere.

She hears Burton’s voice, authoritative and distinct: “Calm down.”

Then the outraged lioness roar of his beloved Elizabeth, heard and far and wide and possibly all the way back to Los Angeles too: “Who the __hell__ took my __goddamned bottle of Veuve Cliquot__?”

Deborah gapes. She imagines headlines: _ _Liz and Dick Murder Their Aging Costars Over Champagne! Mercy Killing, says Liz.__

Ava releases a torrent of contagious, girlish giggles. In a feeble attempt to smother their rapidly escalating laughter, they crash and curl into each other and Deborah feels Ava’s mouth on her skin, fluttering breaths convulsing against her shoulder.

The Veuve Cliquot Inquisition draws frighteningly closer. Ava draws in a calming breath and murmurs, “Hush,” the syllable drenched in the syrup of her North Carolina home, the same accent that Ava lets slip when she’s most comfortable with someone.

Before Deborah can protest, Ava lightly places her index finger against Deborah’s lips.

Mercifully, the disgruntled voices of the World’s Most Famous Couple fade away; at this point the World’s Most Famous Couple could dissolve into thin air for all she cares because Ava has touched her lips, however innocuously, and she cannot conceal her reaction. Her lips tremble and part expectantly and she imagines—she knows—that Ava feels the vibrato, the after-hiss of a cello string in a musical notation of her own making. She closes her eyes. When she opens them again she finds Ava staring curiously, head tilted, at her lips.

Then, with a vigorous shake of her head, Ava leaps up and goes into the kitchen.

“You should have seen it,” she calls. Deborah sits up frantically and tugs as her dress, as if some great impropriety had been let loose, a spirit accosting her. No, she tells herself, you are the spirit, you are the succubus. “It was like taking candy from a baby. They leave their goddamn door unlocked all the time, and I knew they were down at the cantina, so—” Ava emerges from the kitchen with a towel cosseting the neck of the bottle. With a confident twist she uncorks the bottle in one strong, flawless go.  

The merry pop of the bottle leavens the mood. Ava flops down next to her on the couch and they trade sips straight from the frothy cool bottle.

“When you were a kid,” Ava begins, “did you ever imagine it?”

“Imagine what?”

“All this. The travel, the people, the work. It’s all just so—unreal at times. You know? It hardly feels like real work most of the time. It feels unearned. Like I don’t know what I ever did to earn it. It’s a dream. I mean, hell, where I’m from—life was so—” Ava shakes her head. “So this life we lead now—so fantastical, so undeserved.”

She knows about Ava’s past—the hardscrabble existence of a family always on the move and one step away from ruin. “No. You deserve it,” Deborah says. “If anyone deserves it, it’s you.”

Low and disbelieving, Ava laughs and once again puts the bottle to her lips. After a long and satisfying swig her mouth glistens; absently her tongue traces her upper lip, a last swipe to take in the delicate, deceptive potency of the champagne.

She passes off the bottle to Deborah, who takes a tiny sip and strokes the cool green of the bottle; her thumb snags the label loosened by the damp. Someone, she begs silently, tell me what to do. But the glimmering lips of the woman next to her are prophecy enough; she cannot help but continue to stare at that mouth, slackened into sensuality, as she awaits an oracle-like pronouncement fueled by the grand spirit of Madame Cliquot.

Instead Ava’s glance lingers on her face—her cheeks burn as she realizes she is being scrutinized in precisely the same way; the contours of her mouth a bold detail of a memory yet to be made.

“I’m not gonna say no,” Ava finally slurs.

The pronouncement made, it is astonishingly easy enough to follow through; their mouths are in close proximity anyway, and the hesitant brush of their lips is enough of a spark to burn through them for the rest of the night—and for a surprising amount of nights in the weeks to follow. The escalating heat of their kisses are, at first, unbearable and maddening, but there is cool satisfaction in the release that follows and that night, as she sleeps in sweaty bliss next to one of the most beautiful women in the world, for the first time in days she does not need the shelter of childhood dreams.

On the final day of the shoot, the same day that Burton and Elizabeth are set to return to the States, Deborah finds the perfect moment to slip into their digs unnoticed, where she tucks the empty bottle of Veuve Cliquot—nestling it seductively in a pool of perfumed French lingerie—into Elizabeth’s monogramed handmade valise.

****


End file.
